What's the Deal with Double Negatives in English?

Additionally, the majority of English-speakers across the world speak it as a second language, and so, there is also the influence from other languages to contend with. In French and Spanish, for example, two languages English comes into a lot of contact with, you do build the negative with two markers. Both Yo no tengo nada and Je n’ai pas rien use negative markers in a way that’s supposed to make the entire sentence positive. And yet, the French and Spanish don’t really seem to have any trouble decoding the meaning.